AO3 - social support

• One strength is social support has been shown to help individuals resist the pressure to obey

  • Milgram conducted a variation of his original experiment in which he gave the participant social support in the form of two confederate "teachers"
  • 1 teacher refused to continue at 150v, and at 210v, the second teacher refused to continue
  • obedience rate dropped from 65% to 10%
  • Milgram argues this reduction in obedience was due to the defiant actions of the peers, reducing the experimenter's legitimacy of authority
• Another strength is social support has been shown to help individuals resist the pressure to conform

  • Asch's unanimity variation, one of the confederates breaks the unanimity of the group by providing the correct response
  • Conformity rate drops from 32% to 5.5%
  • In an experimental set-up similar to Asch, Allen and Levine (1971) found even when they gave the participant a dissenting ally with thick glasses who claimed they had "extremely limited eyesight" Px still used this "invalid social support" and conformity was significantly reduced
• (-) Social support is an incomplete explanation for resistance

  • there are still some individuals who continue to obey and conform, even with the presence of significant social support
  • 10% of participants in the Milgram variation and in 5.5% of the critical trials in the Asch variation
  • seems there are other important factors; these may be dispositional, such as the individual's locus of control, or if they have an authoritarian personality